Wow. The career bloggers seem to have found their lightening rod in a post written by Toby Dayton on his blog Diggings. The post talks about how, according to the US Department of Labor, the average unemployed American spends 18 minutes per day looking for a job.

After reading the responses from G.L. Hoffman and Louise Fletcher, I thought it would be worthwhile dropping my two cents into the fray.

Just to play devil’s advocate, here are the legitimate circumstances where 18 minutes of daily job hunting is appropriate:

1. If you are independently wealthy and only looking for a job because you are bored.
2. Your parents have great connections and you are waiting for one to come through.
3. You are ignorant of what it takes to find a job (I’m agreeing with G.L. whole-heartedly on this one).

Time a short anecdote. When I graduated from school a few years back, I was averaging 8-hours per day on the job hunt. This was 2-3 hours of looking for open jobs, and 5-6 hours of writing customized resumes and cover letters for the positions I thought were a good fit. I was applying to 10+ jobs per day. At this rate, it still took 3 weeks before I started getting callbacks for interviews. (Note: The economy was much better back then).

If I looked for only 18 minutes each day, I would have been searching for months before I landed that job. This is far too little time to be spending on the job search.

While part of me hopes this statistic isn’t accurate, the other part hopes that it is, just because it means that there will be less competition for those who are truly worthy of work in this environment.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment below!

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